At first, Godblock upset me.
It left me feeling hurt and sad, so much so that I had to put a link to it and see what others thought.
Looking at the site a second time, it could be a joke. Certainly it’s vaporware, because if you try and download it, you get a message saying that it’s not ready yet.
But whether a joke or in earnest, it’s worth looking at.
I don’t think it’s particularly satanic, at least… no more than regular human sinful behaviour is satanic.
I don’t think it’s particularly post-modern.
I interpret Godblock as the result of a particular attitude that is prevalent among many computer programmers and, dare I say, geeks. If you read programming blogs or forums or news sites, you see this attitude popping up all over the place. Just browse any Slashdot thread where intelligent design is mentioned and you’ll see this attitude manifest very, very quickly.
It’s an attitude that values, “smart”. It’s an attitude that attaches no small degree of pride to being smart. It brings a certain belligerence towards the stupid and, ultimately, I think it’s an attitude that comes out of a lot of suffering. I’ll say more on this in a bit, but first…
Why is GodBlock considered smart?
The idea of a filter blocking religious content is clever. It’s clever because it’s ironic. Filtering harmful content is something that religious zealots of all stripes do, so turning the tables on them is a brilliant stroke to be rewarded.
It’s smart because it takes advantage of what a clever person can do with computers. It relies on technical chops.
And finally, it’s smart because it protects smart things.
Science, human rights, civil rights, protecting the environment… These are considered to be “Smart Things” in programming circles. Especially science. I’m surprised Scientologists don’t get a look in here.
GodBlock is attractive on these grounds.
But at the same time, it’s an example of smart being used as a weapon.
Where the Attitude comes from
I’m not sure I can definitively say where it comes from. It’s not a post-modern attitude. It’s an aggressive, “Science is right and smart is right and stupid need not apply” attitude, which is a great deal different than the post modern one.
In technical or scientific arguments, someone is right and someone is wrong and usually it’s the smarter person who is right. If you pin your career on being smart and on being right, it means that you have to be intolerant of wrong answers and decisive in quashing them. If you ever get involved in technical arguments on the internet, this culture is greatly magnified, because nothing spreads quite so quickly as wrong answers. Stupid people on the internet can do a lot of wrong.
When stupid people win arguments, the logic goes, projects suffer and the work suffers and the smart people suffer under stupid situations. Everybody loses.
The reason I think it’s an attitude born of suffering is because I think across North America, there’s been a great deal of suffering at the hands of a cultural Church which has elevated dogma, culture, and tradition over reason and true faith. There is a huge amount of patronizing, simplistic, false Christian media out there.
A backlash can be expected. Yes, it is ugly. Yes, it is aggressive. Yes, it is misguided. But it’s an understandable backlash and perhaps a predictable backlash, and perhaps even an avoidable backlash. For this reason, I don’t think it’s any more satanic than our regular human delusion is satanic.
There are a lot of techies out there who rail violently against web censorship of any kind, and who understand that, for technical reasons alone, Godblock is futile and useless. It is the wrong answer to the problem. I don’t think Godblock (even if it’s real) will ever get much traction at all from professional computer folk.
But there might be quite a few who would agree that it’s the wrong answer to the right problem.
(If you want to see a good example of what I think is behind Godblock, look at this post by Tim Bray, alpha geek and creator of XML)
That’s a cheerful analysis- a lot more hopeful than the creepy alternatives.
Which reminds me- What’s become of Gretel- especially part VI? It’s not listed with the rest of the Fairy Tales. I thought about it tonight/this morning because I’ve been back-translating Hansel and Gretel, adopted into Hebrew for first-year students. I realized I didn’t like the story any better in the adaptation than I do in the original but I remembered liking your retake- so I went back to this blog to re-read. A search did bring it up the story of course- but it revealed that it was deemed to be still under construction.
Umm… coming soon to a blog near you?